addicted to Free Software Development

vim config for Markdown+LaTeX pandoc editing

I have used LaTeX and latex-beamer for pretty much my entire life of document and presentation production, i. e. since about my 9th school grade. I’ve always found the LaTeX syntax a bit clumsy, but with good enough editor shortcuts to insert e. g. \begin{itemize} \item...\end{itemize} with just two keystrokes, it has been good enough for me.

A few months ago a friend of mine pointed out pandoc to me, which is just simply awesome. It can convert between a million document formats, but most importantly take Markdown and spit out LaTeX, or directly PDF (through an intermediate step of building a LaTeX document and calling pdftex). It also has a template for beamer. Documents now look soo much more readable and are easier to write! And you can always directly write LaTeX commands without any fuss, so that you can use markdown for the structure/headings/enumerations/etc., and LaTeX for formulax, XYTex and the other goodies. That’s how it should always should have been! ☺

Thank you so much! I did not know of pandoc, so the information is of great service as well as your config file. Being a bit of a minimalist, which I don’t think is uncommon in the Vim community, I kept looking after most search results gave me VimLatex, and I am so glad I did.